Well, I’m back in Naija, where I’m no longer sure I want to be. Don’t get me wrong, while holidaying in Jand (UK) , I’d missed my country bad, but now as I take fatigued steps off the airplane and have the humid heat slap me like a hot towel, effectively snatching a gasp from me, I’m suddenly not as happy to be home as I had thought I’d be.
I look up at the sun, something I had made a mental note to do in those cold transitory days from winter to spring, at those times when the sun would shine brightly but would also adamantly refuse to work at getting any warmth across to me - the poor visitor hurdled in my faded winter jacket, hands in pockets, walking briskly (At a pace I could never have achieved in Naija) to keep the cold away; and all the faster to get home or into Tesco, Next, Primark, Assesorize, WHSmith, the tube, the W15 bus… anywhere, with a central heating system.
Anyway, here I am back on terra cognita, where the sun did work, and not only worked but did overtime and went into overdrive for full measure. Gazing into the sun, I am immediately sorry I do as it shoots powerful rays into my eyes, totally blinding me. As if that isn’t punishment enough, I practically feel the heat singeing my eyelashes (or maybe that is just my imagination talking because they - the lashes, that is - are still there, still scanty, when again I check). Ok, so the sun doesn’t succeed in turning my lashes to ashes but I can feel it slowly but very surely bringing my melanin back to fore, recalling it from the one-month leave of absence it took during my trip abroad.
And I can almost hear you thinking it now; ‘Oh so she spent just a month away and we won’t hear word again!’ But I promise you, I’m not really like my people who go to the UK and bring back a South-American drawl as proof of their travel. No, I’m not. But I must say that as I sit in the car, being whisked towards home by my dad, Naija was taking a lot of ‘returning’ used to.
I don’t know if it is just Lagos but I can tell you it all comes rushing back to me. I am forcefully brought back to reality and I wonder how I could ever have forgotten .No nostalgic rediscovery of what I have missed here, no sir! Rather, I receive my welcome with a full body slam. The sights… brimming gutters, cauldron sized port holes, shanties and kiosks, posters adorning walls and bridges, creating awareness on any and everything. I am reminded about the upcoming elections when I see Tunde Fashola’s face whiz by one, two, three… twenty times in quick succession. I wonder if posting about a hundred posters on a long stretch of ‘under bridge’ is for the purpose of reinforcing the message as many times as there are posters.
Anyway, now come the smells… I must say my heart longs for long denied Nigerian food as we catch up with and eventually overtake the profound smell of bean cakes frying in the noon day (I have been starved of what I consider real food for a whole month and can only hope my mum has deemed it fit to welcome me back in the way she knows best how to – with fresh fish stew) That one good aroma didn’t last though as we almost immediately speed past a refuse dump… God, what a re-awakening, I had forgotten that waste smells this bad. Generally however, that original Naija, or is it Lagos, smell pervades. That cumulative smell of various milder ones trying to assert supremacy; the combined smells of unwashed bodies, vehicle exhaust, the ubiquitous fish smell and many others jostling for first place in the nostrils of the resigned populace.
Then the sounds… I can’t begin to explain it. How can anywhere be so noisy? This type of noise is dangerous. It can pierce eardrums, render infants deaf. It gets into the brain and stops thought. It is relentless, merciless. And I am at its mercy – at the mercy of the okada rider who has installed a trailer’s horn and is now registering his impatience at a bus driver stopping to pick up a passenger by placing his hand on his torture instrument and simply forgetting said limb there for, yes, all of two minutes - by which time I am almost crazed. Still I am subjected to the keening calls of pure water re…la casera… rishaj cards and all-what-nots from the hawkers trawling the roads.
It is a desperate situation and I am about ready to kill for some quiet, odourless and preferably unlit (so I wouldn’t have to see a thing) space, hopefully at home.
But the ones to whom I am back, for whom I am here – family and friends - are waiting for me on my return home and for each hug, back slap, plucked cheek I get, I think, hey Naija is it! I am back to my people, wrested from the claws of the unrelenting solitude I have gone through for four weeks. A life where chances were you didn’t know your neighbours nor did you talk to them, and in the odd instance that you did speak, it was about the post (you or they have been kind enough to collect a package from the postman). Or about the weather: ‘Oh it’s five degrees going on zero today’. I have finally escaped a time spent wandering the house on Forest Road like the ghost of a dead prisoner; dreading the cold air outside yet wanting to escape the deafening silence within. No noise of lively political arguments there or the next door neighbour screaming blue murder. No, there, the loudest noise was that of birds chirping – a sound I never quite made out in the chaos that is Lagos.
Aaah! I exhale as I take my first fork-full of well cooked rice and (yeah, you guessed right) fresh fish stew. I feel the pepper burn my tongue and say a silent praise; melted wax almost dripping from my ears at the intensity of it. Yes, I am back home, where pepper plays its God- given part in food. No more the bland, tasteless English cuisine or the Naija food wannabe of the Nigerians in the UK side of diaspora.
I love Nigeria, I decide suddenly, I love hanging with friends, all decked in the latest fashion, pretending to be cooler than we are as we visit entertainment spots and stores, I love the gossip, the ever present gist. I love browsing expensive supermarkets, rich toaster in tow, knowing he’ll snap up any item I so much as glance at (no such luck in Jand sha). I love that the currency is, well, normal and I don’t have to make compulsory, if often inaccurate, multiplications by two fifty every time I have to make a purchase.
I love knowing that if I get tired of the effusive welcome I am getting now, I could get up, go to my neighbour/ friend’s house, go up to her room, lay on her bed, doze off mid-sentence, wake up to filch the last bar of bounty from her fridge, bid her farewell and sashay home certain she will be there tomorrow, ready for another visit at the sight of me at her door, without need for an appointment.
I don’t just love Naija, I conclude, I am smitten with it. But remind me of that tomorrow when I am crushed between four other passengers, sweating my way from CMS to Ikeja in the dreadful traffic; taking in, albeit unwillingly, carbon monoxide from the molue backfiring beside me; and trying unsuccessfully to avoid brushing my nose with the hairy, unwashed armpit of the orobo sitting next to me.
Yes, remind me then how much I love Naija!
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